More jobs? What about food?

Abstract

In response to a comment on my last article, I point out that
emphasizing job creation reinforces unsustainable growth policies, and I
also consider the relationship between jobs and food in our
society.

Whenever any of us—including myself—wants a job that did not
previously exist, we implicitly encourage the broad policy of economic
growth.

Kimberly wanted to be careful about this point, and
rightfully so:

I don't know that this is necessarily the case. We could want a
job that didn't previously exist while being fine with the disappearance
of a job that does exist. Or we could want there to be more but smaller
jobs, so creating a new job involves splitting a previously existing
job. The way I see it is that there's plenty of stuff that needs done,
and (for now, at least) we can produce enough food for everyone, so
employment is basically a logistical problem.

I have wanted to write more about this for a while, so this
is a good opportunity to get some of that out. I started to respond as a
regular comment to the original article, but that comment rapidly grew (heh)
long enough that I thought it warranted its own article.

In her response, Kimberly touches on two important facets of this
problem: the modern employment culture and food availability. One can
certainly imagine people looking for jobs that complement the elimination of
other jobs, or everyone working less in order to amortize the availability
of income across all people. For example, with somewhere between 2 and 6
million people looking for employment in the United States, one plan would
be to have several million other people work less, thus allowing the
currently-unemployed to fill in the gaps, as it were. In fact, Professor
Jackson talks about these sorts of strategies to arrive at a zero-growth
economy in Prosperity
without growth?

Are you, people you know, and others happy to scale
back your job and coordinate with others to do your job together?

It's important to note that this is not where we are now, culturally.
We don't generally tell each other that we should work less, but rather that
we should keep climbing the ladder. We strongly encourage our fellows to
become small (leading to, if possible, large) business owners (or in varied
other ways to expand their practice), in order to create new jobs for
others. Many of our policies are explicitly designed to support corporations
and business owners, which facilitates this cultural imperative. I know from
personal experience that members of the mainstream look with shock and
something approaching horror at others who actively try to work less. This
is a consumptive growth culture, not one that values sustainability.

What is so important about the employment of 200 million people in the
United States today that was not being done by 20 million people a century
and a half ago? It seems to me that there are enormous sectors of employment
that offer very dubious value. 854,000
people with top-secret clearances forming “a Top Secret
America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight”?
Is that really necessary? Do we need all the jobs that correspond to a
larger military outlay than the rest of the world combined? Many people know
how I feel about the natural resource extraction industries, and I'm no fan
of industries that have urged us to define ourselves by what and how much we
buy. I could go on, asking pointed questions about the need for jobs in
almost every sector imaginable. But the core point is there. What kinds of
jobs do people actually do in the United States (and elsewhere), and
why?

In a 1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan
offered this observation: “We have about 50 percent of the world's
wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.” The challenge facing
American policymakers, he continued, was “to devise a pattern of
relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity.” Here we
have a description of American purposes that is far more candid than all
of the rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world
peace, or exercising global leadership.

Kimberly then points out that for many people, a job is just a way to
acquire those necessities of life (represented quite understandably by
food). Other than the now sadly impotent concept of charity (more on that in
a moment), having a job is the only way for all but the wealthy to acquire
food in our society. But having a job hooks you in to the
monetary economic system, which exists primarily to facilitate and
streamline economic growth. This is, of course, extremely useful,
if you believe that economic growth is good.

So yes, growth is dangerously powerful, and yes, our individual
choices are both shaped by, and help shape, the culture around us, and yes,
those choices include our commitments to our jobs and our food systems, and
yes, we have been seduced by the lure of growth, the combined desire and
imperative to take ever more from the world so as to better secure our own
position in it[2]. But the world only has so much to give. Professor
Bartlett sums all of this up pretty succinctly in what he calls the
First Law of Sustainability:

Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of
resources cannot be sustained!

We need another way.

[1]

And these are just a tiny sample of a host of resources that
discuss these problems, both on the Internet and beyond.